Half-Blood Blues (28 page)

Worse, seemed she start in on the kid again, fussing over him, paying him all kinds of attention. Luring him from the shell of his damn silences. And he come crawling out. Chip told me all bout it over lunch. How that morning, in the market, the kid been buying her trinkets, cheap tin rings, headscarves and such.

I was grinding my old teeth down to their stumps, hearing him tell it.

‘She was lookin for you too, brother,’ he said.

‘She was there? At the market?’

‘In the bony flesh.’

‘Ain’t that a wonder,’ I said, scowling.

She caught up with us at last that afternoon. We was in Jean’s old music store, where all the gates in Paris gone for the sweet sound, looking for some damn obscure record Chip wanted. It was a dark basement shop, dusty and unswept, and the weak daylight filtered in through high, filthy windows. There was brass horns strung up all about, hanging like a curtain of dead game.

The door banged open, and there she was, descending the stairs in her long heels, laughing, clinging to the kid’s skinny arm. Hell. Something turned in me.

Chip ducked to see round the horns. ‘Hiero, brother, you got a little somethin on you sleeve.’

‘Ooh, boys,’ said Delilah, ‘I’m still shaking.’

‘Hiero’s that good, huh?’ smiled Chip.

At the mention of his name, that scrawny Judas untangled his arm from hers, drifted over. He look embarassed. I moved away, toward the piano.

Lilah laughed. Her crowded teeth shining like rice in her dark mouth. ‘We were just down at Place Pigalle, and who do you think we—’

‘Aw, what you two doin down there?’ I chuckled, forcing a grin. It come out sounding sort of choked. I start to plink nervously on two of the keys.

Chip give me a look.

She furrowed her brow. ‘Who do you think we ran into?’ she finished.

Chip shrugged. ‘George Washington. No, wait. Abe Lincoln.’

‘Jo Baker,’ she said. ‘Josephine Baker.’

Well, ain’t you grand
, I thought with unexpected bitterness.
Ain’t you special
.

Delilah was fussing with the jangling bangles on her wrists. She worn long white gloves. Give me a pang of tenderness, seeing how self-conscious she was. But I dragged it back. I
wanted
to be annoyed.

I closed the lid of the piano with a heavy thud and she glance over, quick, then look back at Chip. ‘That Jo Baker can put a girl right off her day. She can make you feel like you’re nothing but fluff, just Lou’s bit of fluff.’

‘Aw, girl,’ said Chip. ‘You a lot of things, but you ain’t fluff.’

She looked at him to see if he was mocking. ‘And her sashaying all about town with those ridiculous swans and leopards and god only knows what else all following behind. She puts on such airs. Looks right through you. You ever heard her sing, Chip?’

‘I
seen
her sing,’ he smiled. ‘It ain’t the same thing.’

‘What’d you think?’

He chuckled. ‘Very talented, what all I could
see
.’

Lilah made a sour face. ‘She’s just a cheap copy of Addie Hall. You ever heard Addie in person? She’s been doing what Jo does for years. Jo can’t hold a candle to her.’

Then, slow-like, she lift up her green eyes and look at me with real hurt.

Hell. This was my cue. I was meant to say,
You know you ten times the woman she is, Lilah girl. You know fame’s comin you way any day now, it ain’t lost you address.

But I ain’t said it. I don’t know, I guess mercy is a muscle like any other. You got to exercise it, or it just cramp right up.

That was the day the consul ordered us home, all Yanks who couldn’t ‘prove they had important business in France’. It was on the radio, in the papers, on the lips of grocers and delivery boys. Seemed every damn American in Paris was buying souvenirs for the voyage west. But, hell. Ain’t nothing more important than backing old Louis.

I met Delilah for a late dinner, just the two of us, at a underground bistro down by the Seine. It been a wine cellar once, and the soft smell of smoked casks come up through the creaking floor. Rickety tables, candlelight, a trellis overhead hairy with vines. The air felt cool in the darkness. First thing she asked about was the consul.

‘Aw, I ain’t goin back,’ I said. ‘Neither’s Chip.’

‘You should,’ she said. ‘Staying can’t help anyone. There’s no point in it.’

‘Louis goin?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m sure he will be. He won’t go just yet. But he’ll go.’

‘You goin with him?’

‘I always do.’

I give her a hard look. ‘And what about the kid? You just goin leave Hiero here?’

She frowned. ‘I’ll come up with something. I don’t know what.’

‘Sure you will, girl. You ain’t the sort to just disappear.’

She flinched.

I regretted it at once. But my guts was all knotted up. I was still brooding on her and the kid linking arms in Jean’s that afternoon. We was sitting at a small table set against the cellar wall, and I leaned one shoulder against the cold bricks and stared at her. The hard angles of her cheekbones in the candlelight. Her long graceful throat. How beautiful she was.

She lowered her face, turned the glass of wine in front of her in slow lazy circles. She looked away.

‘I didn’t want to go,’ she said soft-like. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I fidgeted with the knife and fork beside the plate. That basket of bread sat steaming between us, and though I was starving, I ain’t cut so much as a slice.

‘We don’t need to talk about it, you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I mean that.’

‘It was awful, Sid.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t know.’

I said nothing.

She give me a dark look, took a breath. ‘We’d gone back to the apartment for his medicine,’ she began, in a flat voice. ‘I don’t know what for. Paul didn’t try to explain it to me – the language. But I think even if I did speak German he wouldn’t have explained it. It seemed a private thing. Anyway, we were heading away from my hotel—’

‘
Your
hotel?’

‘For my suitcase. It was on the way back.’

‘Listen, you don’t got to tell me,’ I said. ‘You don’t got to go back there.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I do.’

I give her a grim, exasperated look.

‘We were on our way back,’ she continued, ‘when I heard someone shout his name. I don’t know why he looked back. But then he was running into the crowd. I stood there holding my suitcase and then two men shoved past me, hollering at him. I didn’t know what it was about. I mean I didn’t know it then. But then they were shouting
Jude
, and I knew that well enough. Oh, Sid, they threw him up against a window. There were people in there, looking out. I tried to get in front of Paul with my suitcase but those men knocked me down.’

‘They was Boots?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

I ain’t wanted to feel anger. I ain’t wanted nothing but sadness for her. But I could feel myself scowling. ‘Hell, girl. You walkin round Berlin with a Jew, carryin a damn
suitcase
? What you thinkin?’

She blushed, looking off up the street in the dying sunlight.

‘What you
thinkin
?’ I said again.

She started to cry. ‘I didn’t know, Sid. I didn’t know.’

She was crying, real quiet, her thin shoulders shaking. I sat very still, staring guiltily at the tablecloth. All a sudden I wasn’t angry with her no more. If they called his name, I was thinking. If they called his name, they
known
him. Suitcase ain’t got nothing to do with it.

A long shadow hovered suddenly above us. I glanced up. A handsome black gent stood there wearing a fine black suit, his shirt ironed so sharp its collar look like folded paper.

‘Lilah?’ he said. ‘You alright, girl?’

She give a angry laugh through her tears, looked up. ‘Oh, hi, Billy. I’m fine, I am. Jesus.’ She sniffled. ‘I thought you were gone.’

‘Aw, I been tryin to call you, girl.’ He smiled to reveal gleaming white incisors. Like a damn wolf. ‘You one impossible lady to reach. I only got the one number.’

‘Well, I only have the one phone. So that’s not the problem.’ She give him one of her sad smiles, wiping the water from her eyes with her thumbs.

‘I ain’t meant to intrude,’ he said.

‘It’s alright, Billy. Really it is. I’m up on Abbesses now, in the count’s old flat. Drop on in, anytime.’

The jack’s eyes slid over to me, his shine fading a little.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She folded her napkin. ‘Bill, this is Sidney Griffiths. Sid, Bill Coleman. I believe you’re both in the business.’

Bill
Coleman
? I rose from my seat. ‘Sure I know you, brother. You out of this
world
. You got to be this city’s second trumpet.’

‘You kind,’ he said.

‘It ain’t kindness. You that good, brother. You know it.’

‘Used to be maybe. But who’s this damn kid come in on the tide? I heard he plays like wildfire.’

‘The new generation,’ I said. ‘We gettin our come-uppance.’

‘Figure it near time to clock out, ship on back to the island.’

Delilah give him a look. ‘You’re going back to New York?’

‘Chicago, girl. Ain’t no other island.’

‘Chicago’s not an island, Billy.’

He smiled. ‘It be a island in the sea of
mediocrity
.’

‘You sure it ain’t this old war runnin you out?’ I said.

‘Brother, I done already lost that one. Germans overrun me.’

I ain’t said nothing to that.

‘You bring that Chip Jones with you?’ he said.

‘You know Chip?’

‘Aw,’ he said with a sly grin. ‘Everybody know that son of a bitch. Give him a brass hello from me.’

‘When’re you sailing?’ said Delilah.

Coleman shrugged. ‘Ain’t got no plans yet. It got to happen though, surely. What you doin? You ain’t stickin round?’

She smiled. ‘Where Louis goes, there go I.’

Our dishes arrived then, and Coleman muttered some excuse, already backing away from our table. ‘I goin drop by one a these days, Lilah. I see you then. Sidney.’ He give me a nod.

But Delilah called after him, ‘So you’ll be here for a while? Even with your consul shutting down the party?’

Coleman shrugged, his smile light and boyish. He bumped into a table, turned around, turned back. ‘Lady, I
am
the party.’

Then he was gone.

We et in silence then for a long while. It ain’t seemed right to start in on it all again. She seemed real cold, real calm. I felt uneasy. The fish I’d ordered tasted dry, thin, like sawdust sprinkled with lemon.

‘Well, he seem grand,’ I said at last. It come out sharper than I meant.

She frowned, stared past me at the swinging door to the kitchen. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, Sid.’

I give a bitter laugh. ‘I wasn’t thinkin it.’

‘Yes you were.’

‘Delilah, you ain’t got to—’

But she put her gloved hand on mine, her eyes bright and sharp. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, then paused, as if the sound of her own voice made her forget what seem so straightforward just seconds ago. She wet her lips. ‘Sometimes life just leaves no room for what you want. I’m sorry.’ She sighed. ‘You don’t know how sorry I am.’

Heat rushed to my face. ‘Sure. It all done now anyhow.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘I just glad you got out.’

She stared a long time at me. ‘I didn’t say goodbye because I didn’t want it to end like that. It wouldn’t soften things. I was afraid anything I said would sound empty, which would’ve been worse than saying nothing. At least that’s how it struck me at the time – you’d hear these shallow words, this
I’ll think of you everyday
and whatever, and think, man, she is goddamn empty.’

I watched her face dim, her hands soft against the wine-stained tablecloth. She started fussing with the top button of her suit jacket.

I felt sick, disappointed, somehow. ‘You want to go?’

‘Yes. I’m done.’ She folded her fork and knife on her plate with a click. Girl ain’t hardly touched her food.

We made our way out into the dusk of emptying streets. There was so much running through me, so much I got no intention of saying or couldn’t even think how to express. I looked off down the avenue, at the bright brasserie teeming with people, the plaza with its thin traffic, the awnings under electric lights with their soot and birdshit.

We walked a while, not touching. Then she took my arm. I felt the old electricity running along my elbow and through the muscle, and I shivered, everything going quiet in me. We was crossing the bridge over the water when she slowed, glanced over the stone railing.

‘Whatever happened to Dame Delilah the Second?’ she said.

‘The Dame? Tossed her back in the pit.’

‘For real?’

‘For real. Kid dumped her back in the wall. It was either there or in the streets.’

‘Sid,’ she said abruptly. ‘I can’t be with you. Not like before.’

‘It alright.’ I felt sick. ‘I understand.’

But she let go my arm and stood staring me down. ‘You
understand
? You’d let it go? Just like that?’

All a sudden I wasn’t sure just what I supposed to say.

‘No?’ I said.

‘No what?’

I was watching her for some clue as to what the right thing was.

‘No, I wouldn’t?’ I said at last. And then, in a softer voice: ‘I thought you brung me out here to say goodbye, I thought that’s what you been sayin all night. Ain’t it what you been sayin?’

She was silent a long time. The streetlights over the Seine slid over the oily scum and we watched a long, dark barge drift past, cut across the lights, vanish again downriver. A man was walking across the far bridge, his footfalls in three-quarter time. I took off my jacket, draped it over her shoulders.

‘You cold, girl? You want to be gettin back?’

She looked up at me. She was shivering. ‘Tell me you love me.’

‘No.’

‘Tell me.’

I smiled, sort of sad-like. ‘Aw, girl. You goin break my heart.’

She rested her head against my chest, looking out at the slow waters, and I thought, very suddenly:
Sid, brother, anything true got to always be this simple, this clear.